A Polish Day at Gainsborough’s House

10th Sep 2009; 10:00

This day is being sponsored jointly by the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland in London and the Eastern Region of the Royal Society of Arts. It is one of a series of events designed to promote an awareness of the ‘high culture’ of a nation many of whose people live among us, in Sudbury and its area.
 The chief concern of our day – here in Sudbury, itself a historic ‘textile’ town – will be a consideration of two of the great ‘textile’ cities of nineteenth – century Europe, Manchester and Lodz, as represented respectively in the works of two great novelists, Elizabeth Gaskell and Wladyslaw Reymont (Nobel Laureate). Reymont will be represented by showing of a very fine film of his great novel The Promised Land of 1898; very many of you will have read Mary Barton, 1848, and North and South, 1855, by Gaskell, and probably will have seen the recent television adaptation of the latter novel.
 The Polish city of Lodz is, very self-consciously, ‘The Manchester of Poland’. Reymont’s The Promised Land explores several important themes relating to the production of nineteenth-century textiles: the extremes of poverty and wealth; class conflict; rurality versus  urbanisation; conflicts between ethnic and cultural groups- Polish Catholics, German Protestants, secular and ‘religious’ Jews; railways; industrial chemistry; the significance of the telephone; industrial arson and insurance companies; environmental pollution; young people and their love affairs. Readers of Gaskell will know that she too was concerned with many of these themes; in 1848 the matters of industrial arson and murder were considered by Gaskell just as they were considered by Reymont in 1898.
 The Programme for our Day will be as follows:
10.00 a.m.  Welcome by Sir Conrad Swan, K.C.V.O., K.G.C.N.
10.05 – 11.15 a.m. The Promised Land, Part 1
Refreshment break (drinks available for a small charge at the House)
11.30 a.m. – 12.45 p.m. The Promised Land, Part 2
Break for lunch: bring a packed lunch, or visit one of the nearby eating-places.
1.45 – 3 p.m. The Promised Land, Part 3
Refreshment break (drinks available for a small charge at the House)
3.15 – 4/4.30 p.m. Discussion, introduced by Matthew Carter of the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre, University of Essex.

Cost: £10

For further information contact Jacob Kalinski
To attend please download and return the booking form